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Haryana cops killed 36 people in a day, yet there’s no outrage

Sixteen-year-old Lovepreet Singh, a resident of Theri village in Punjab’s Muktsar district, had accompanied his aunt to Panchkula just for fun. He was killed in police firing in the rioting that followed Dera Sacha Sauda head Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh’s rape conviction on August 25. Lovepreet’s father Kaka Singh is a devout Sikh and says his son wasn’t even a dera follower. The aunt was. The last thing this village shopkeeper would have wanted was to see his son die for a faith he did not understand or care for.

Angrej Kaur, 60, of Madheer village was an ardent dera follower. She had gone to Panchkula on August 23 for a glimpse of Gurmeet; her husband, a mason, had stayed back. Kaur sustained serious injuries in the August 25 violence and died in a hospital in Chandigarh.

Lovepreet and Angrej Kaur were among the 36 people killed in police firing in Panchkula that day. Barely a month later, their names seem to have become forgotten footnotes in Haryana government records. There is not even a whimper of protest for those who were shot dead by the police. The justification seems to be that most of the dead were dera followers who had turned violent in support of a rape convict.

Many choose to ignore the fact that 36 is among the highest number of people killed in independent India in a single episode of police shooting at civilians in a riot. Haryana police virtually made history in Panchkula.

The Haryana government and state BJP leaders say that had dera followers been stopped from congregating in Panchkula, there was a possibility that Gurmeet would have refused to leave his headquarters in Sirsa and surrounded himself with his followers. According to the government, any attempt to smoke him out of the 750-acre campus would have led to even higher casualties.

But former UP DGP Prakash Singh says smoking out Gurmeet from his headquarters and allowing people to gather in Panchkula are two different things and can’t be equated. “The police brought the situation under control very quickly, but at what cost? Was it avoidable altogether? If they had taken some initial precautions, probably the need for such strict action would not have arisen.” He adds that bringing Gurmeet out of his lair was difficult but not impossible. “It was not like Bhindranwale being protected by retired generals (inside the Golden Temple).”

One of the worst cases of rioting in India in recent years was the 2002 post-Godhra violence in Gujarat which claimed nearly 1,000 lives. Between February 28 and March 3, during the peak of the violence, 47 people were shot dead by police across Gujarat. By April 29, this number had reached 109.

In Panchkula, the police reached a third of that number in just about an hour!

A day after the violence , the HC came down hard on the Manohar Lal Khattar government for allowing such a large group of people to gather at one place in the first place. “It was a political surrender just to allure the vote bank,” observed a full bench of the court during a special hearing. “There is a sea of difference between administrative and political decisions; administrative decisions were paralysed because of political considerations.”

In effect, the state government which was the gatekeeper allowed a very high number of people to gather in a small place, and when they could not control them, they shot and killed 36 people to restore “order”.

The only other country where the police are accused of shooting down too many civilians is the US, with activists and media maintaining a database of killings. According to the Washington Post database, 663 people were shot dead by cops in the US between January 1 and August 31, 2017 — a little less than three a day.

In India, roughly two civilians were killed every week in police firing between 2009 and 2015, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. That amounts to 796 killed in six years, by no means a small number.

Incidentally, a month before the bloodshed in Panchkula, Union minister of state for home Hansraj Ahir told the Lok Sabha that Haryana had topped the country in policemen killing civilians (22 deaths) in 2016, even overtaking strife-torn Jammu and Kashmir (16 deaths). The all-India figure was 92 in 2016.

Last year, a committee headed by Prakash Singh submitted its report to the Haryana government on why its police force had failed so miserably in controlling the Jat reservation riots of February 2016 in which 30 people were killed. “What was lacking was the will to act, the determination to prevent riotous mobs from assembling in the first instance and then dealing with them effectively while they were committing acts of violence, arson, loot or vandalism,” the report observed, adding that the “picture was very dismal and showed deplorable lack of leadership at different levels.”

Reading the report today makes one thing clear. The disaster in Panchkula was foretold.